THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE
Paris, Thursday, October 15th. For the present the jottings in my diary grow farther and farther apart, as events worth recording have during the past weeks occurred with less and less frequency. The volume of Embassy work in the department of Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians has of late been steadily decreasing. Since the end of September our work has chiefly consisted of routine diplomatic correspondence relating to prisoners of war. Mr. Herrick’s efforts have recently been successful in obtaining from the French government an order permitting interned civilians to return by way of Switzerland to their homes in Germany and Austria-Hungary. This achieves the last vital aim for which he has struggled and now that everything has been reduced to calm and routine it is probable that he will soon return to America. The volunteer Attachés, whose duty does not keep them permanently in the diplomatic service, begin to feel that since there is no longer pressing need of their assistance they must soon return to their several professions and to the peaceful occupations of civil life. They have worked under the inspiring leadership of a man with whom familiarity breeds respect, and have had the honor of knowing him as one knows those only with whom one has passed through dark days. Mr. Herrick has proved himself one of those rare men who are possessed of high ideals and far vision and who at the same time refuse to be impractical.
Lieutenant Donait and I are hoping that we may sometime in the near future have an opportunity to make a trip to Berlin with dispatches. We should greatly like to see the other side of the war. Lieutenant Donait is one of the military Attachés at the Embassy with whom I have become particularly friendly.
Tuesday, October 27th. I have finished my work with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians and turned over all my affairs in good order. Of the money sent by the German and Austro-Hungarian Governments for their indigent interned subjects, the Embassy has distributed more than a quarter of a million francs, all of which has passed through my hands. It is a relief to get the accounts balanced and into the charge of the professional bookkeeper whom the secretaries have at last succeeded in engaging.
Lieutenant Donait awaits orders from Washington releasing him from his work at the Embassy. It has been arranged that as soon as these arrive he and I are to go together to Germany as bearers of official dispatches.
For the interim I have offered my services to the Motor Ambulance Corps of the American Hospital. The existence of this hospital and of its ambulance trains is due to Mr. Herrick’s efforts and its creation is one of his greatest diplomatic achievements. Its efficiency, size, and rapid growth have done more to promote friendly relations between France and the United States than any other single factor, excepting only the never-to-be-forgotten fact that the American Embassy remained in Paris when the Germans were approaching the city. The Ambulance Corps is under the guidance of the Ambassador and it was his energy which pushed it through the political and economic difficulties incidental to its inception.
Both the hospital and its Ambulance Corps are under the immediate direction of a committee of prominent Americans, the executive head of which is Dr. Winchester Dubouchet, who bears the title of Surgeon-in-chief. He is a man possessing the rare combination of tact and efficiency. He is thoroughly conversant with the technique of his profession and has in previous wars had large experience with field ambulance service. His ability and skill have proved as important in the organization and running of these institutions as were those of Mr. Herrick in their conception.
Under the wise leadership of Dr. Dubouchet, three other men, Mr. Laurence Benét, Dr. Edmond Gros, and Mr. A. Wellesley Kipling, have been powerful in promoting the phenomenal growth of the Ambulance Corps. Their titles are, respectively, Chairman of the Transportation Committee, Chief Ambulance Surgeon, and Captain of Ambulances. These gentlemen have worked together unselfishly and indefatigably, and the rapidity with which the manifold difficulties incidental to the construction and organization of automobile ambulance trains have been overcome is due to their untiring efforts.
The corps is now being greatly enlarged and I, as a staff officer, am to assist in its reorganization. Some twenty-five automobile ambulances are already in service and this number is soon to be increased to sixty or more cars.
There is in general such a lack of adequate service for the wounded that to work with the Ambulance Corps and thus contribute one’s mite of helpfulness is almost a duty for any American who can spare even a few weeks of time. When one has seen thousands of wounded, as I saw them at the Battle of the Marne, lying for three and four days in the rain without food, drink, or any medical aid, one is irresistibly driven to do something to diminish such terrible suffering. Many young Americans are feeling the same impulse and volunteers for ambulance service are numerous. Appeals for additional ambulance cars, moreover, have received generous response from America. It is estimated that an ambulance costing $1500 will, before it wears out, carry two thousand wounded to hospitals and help the surgeons to save four hundred lives which otherwise must die from lack of prompt attention.
Sunday, November 1st. The last four days have been spent in accomplishing as many as possible of the necessary preliminaries incidental to joining the American Ambulance. They include being vaccinated, certifying whether one has had typhoid, getting measured and fitted for a uniform, being presented to the various officers, going through a lot of formalities leading to the possession of a French chauffeur’s license, filling out parentage and enlistment blanks, and getting proper written introductions and identifications. All these steps have entailed a good deal of rather necessary “red tape,” for in war time it is essential to prove every step in order to avoid “mistakes.”
The equipment of the members of the corps consists of a khaki uniform of very heavy woolen cloth, a khaki overcoat, a fatigue cap, heavy flannel shirts, a khaki necktie, tan puttees, tan shoes, and a tan slicker. The members of the Ambulance obtain this outfit for the surprisingly small sum of forty-seven dollars, each paying for his own equipment.
At odd moments I have been put through stretcher-drill and given rudimentary first-aid instruction. This afternoon and evening I was sent as an orderly on an ambulance running to the suburban station of Aubervilliers at which trains of wounded make a brief stop on their way from the front to the home hospitals in the south of France. It is from this station that the American Hospital receives its patients, invariably cases whose condition is so grave that they are thought to be incapable of enduring further travel without fatal results.
Upon entering the service of the Ambulance all volunteers, no matter what their ultimate position is to be, are required to attain a certain efficiency and practical knowledge in the actual handling of wounded. I am now taking my turn at this service. One train of ambulances is always stationed in Paris and carries wounded from the Aubervilliers station to the various city hospitals. This train is manned by the latest recruits, who there undergo training, being meanwhile carefully observed by the staff officers. The majority of them prove to be good material, and in from two to six weeks are sent to the front, while those who are not judged to be reliable are replaced by new volunteers. Candidates are not required to agree to any definite length of enlistment but are at liberty to leave whenever they so elect. On the other hand, the chiefs of the Ambulance Corps make no promises to send any volunteer to the front but reserve the right to select only those men who have first proved themselves fit for such great responsibility.
Field ambulances are virtually all alike and as a rule hold four stretchers in two tiers. In front are seats for the driver and his orderly, and behind is a boxlike body eight feet long with wooden roof and floor and canvas sides. From the back of the ambulance a wounded man on his stretcher is slid into place as a bread pan is slid into an oven, the feet of the stretcher running on wooden rails. In starting out to collect the wounded an ambulance carries its full quota of stretchers. When a man is picked up from the field of battle one of these is taken out and he is carefully lifted on it; if he is already lying on a stretcher he is not changed but, in order to save unnecessary suffering, put into the ambulance with the one on which he is already resting,—an empty one being left behind in exchange. In order that this process may always be feasible it is necessary that all stretchers should be interchangeable; the Minister of War has, therefore, decreed that a standard stretcher called “Branquard réglementaire,” and no other, must be used throughout the French armies.
As the number of casualties has been overwhelmingly and unexpectedly large, the French have not up to date been able to give proper care to their wounded. It is not uncommon for wounded men en route from the front to be on trains for three and four days, virtually uncared for, and usually without anything to eat. Such trains finally arrive in Paris freighted with death and madness, with gangrene and lockjaw. I today saw two men who had been wounded a month ago and were still in the clothes in which they had fought.
The American Corps keeps ambulances at the Aubervilliers station day and night in relays, so that at any moment not less than two cars are there to receive wounded. Today I was assigned as orderly to an ambulance on the afternoon shift which begins at one o’clock and ends at nine. The receiving station for wounded is a huge express shed about three hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. A railway siding enters through a big door and within runs longitudinally along one wall. A large storage platform occupies the rest of the interior, on which are arranged four parallel benches running nearly the whole length of the shed. Each bench is about seven feet wide and has a slight slope for “drainage.” When we arrived all the benches were crowded with wounded, who were packed side by side in four long ghastly rows. They were wrapped up in their clothes—the same old clothes in which they had fought. The French are, apparently, not sure that the Germans may not yet take Paris, for as a rule they do not permit wounded to be sent to that city. Only those who are slightly wounded in the hand or arm and able to walk, or, on the other hand, those too desperately wounded to survive being moved farther, are allowed to remain in Paris. All the others, although they have already taken two or three days to arrive from the front, are allowed only twelve hours “repose” before they are sent on to the south of France. This “repose” is taken on the benches described above or in similar situations. If the shed is already full and additional trains of wounded arrive, the late comers are left in their cars. Why anyone should consider a train which is standing still more reposeful than one which is moving I cannot imagine. In Paris the wounded at least get something to eat, usually coarse bread with meat and cheese. They arrive in those silly little freight cars marked “eight horses,” each of which carries about eighteen wounded, twelve on stretchers in two tiers in each end and some six more standing or sitting in the aisle, which extends from door to door between the stretchers.
On arriving at the Aubervilliers station we were on duty all the afternoon, and as no trains happened to arrive this meant standing in the rain and doing nothing at all. After dark, however, three train loads of wounded, each of some fifty cars, came in at intervals of about an hour. The wounded are so many that one counts them by trains and the trains come so often that one loses count even of them. No one who has not seen them can possibly comprehend the human misery contained in one such unit. The first train arrived at five o’clock and brought five hundred cases. They had been two days on the way and had had nothing at all to eat for the last nineteen hours.
Seventy-five of their number were unwounded, but had reached such a state of nervous collapse that they could not endure life in the trenches a minute longer, and had therefore, perforce, been sent to the rear. I could not ascertain just how such cases were handled at the front for the French were reluctant to discuss the matter. Certain it is that the instances must have been numerous, for the punishment usually prescribed in war for such delinquency in the face of the enemy is death before a firing squad. The cases must have been so numerous and the ordeal withstood at the front so terrible that punishment became impracticable. In extenuation it may be pointed out that the French army, like any conscript army, contains every able-bodied man of the nation, a certain proportion of whom are inevitably mentally below par and have been sent to war against their will or inclination. The British are the only ones who have fought night and day from the beginning without relays and seem to thrive on it, a fact chiefly due to their being picked volunteers all of whom are soldiers by choice.
After the first train arrived a number of very desperate cases were immediately sorted out and given to our ambulances. The ambulance upon which I served was the last to leave. We departed at seven o’clock, carrying a lieutenant of Chasseurs Alpins who had had his hand shot off and who showed symptoms of lockjaw, and a little private of infantry, a boy with a delicate refined face, who had a bad gangrenous shell wound in the right thigh. His leg was rotting away in a most frightful manner. He was delirious and as weak as a kitten. He imagined he was a little child again and that his mother was causing him all the pain he suffered. He moaned to her reproachfully. We picked our way as slowly and carefully as possible, never making more than four miles an hour and actually avoiding every projecting stone and cobble. In spite of our efforts, our charges suffered frightfully and the delirious boy made this evident in a way which cast a silent spell upon the streets through which we passed. We went up over Montmartre and along the Boulevard Clichy, famous “wicked” street of Paris, because the road surfaces happened to be somewhat smoother. As we went we left behind us a trail of the intangible, all-permeating, sickly-sweetish odor of gangrene.
It is very curious to see how virtually all fatally wounded men know that they are going to die and how they grasp it with a certainty which exceeds the certainty of anything else in life. They often realize it sooner than the surgeons. It is most uncanny. Perhaps it is because their nervous system senses that its foundation has suddenly crumbled. It is very impressive to see the quiet, optimistic calm with which they face the end, and the bigness of it. It makes one feel confident that there is an after-life, or that it is at least right to die for an ideal.
Monday, November 2d. Francis Colby, who drove me when I went to get the children of the Countess X., has recently enlisted in the American Ambulance. He is at present organizing one of the new trains of ambulances of which he will probably have charge when it is complete. These new trains are to be made up of large cars, each carrying six sitting or four lying cases. They will be able to travel five hundred kilometers without taking on gasoline, oil, or other supplies and are to carry repair outfits and food supplies. Every man in service with these trains, no matter what his position, must have a French chauffeur’s license, thus providing not only greater elasticity in action but enabling the men to drive in relays. The amount of detail connected with the preparation of such units is immense.
Saturday, November 7th. Two ambulances are being shipped from England to Boulogne, and Colby and myself with two other men are to be sent out to get them. The necessary permits from the General Staff have been applied for.
Monday, November 9th. We received this morning the permits for the trip to Boulogne. Dr. Walker and William Iselin are to accompany Colby and myself; we expect to leave early tomorrow morning. We are to drive an ambulance—a twenty horse-power (English rating) Daimler—and on our way shall follow close to the battle line in order to hunt suitable locations for the new ambulance trains. We go by way of Montdidier, Amiens, and Doullens, all of which contain base hospitals.
Tuesday, November 10th. We left Paris at ten this morning by the Porte St. Denis and proceeded through Aubervilliers and Ecuen to Chantilly, where we stopped for lunch. The motor had been running very badly, and as no one else seemed willing to try conclusions with it I undertook the task. The trouble proved to be in the carbureter. After I had taken this to pieces and put it together again everything went smoothly. While I was at work, the other members of the party wandered about the town and talked with the inhabitants, whose village had been occupied by the Germans for several days during their dash toward Paris. It was well that the most valuable articles in the museum of the château had been hidden away before the Germans arrived, as they carried off pretty much everything that was in sight.
The first Germans who had entered the town had not worn the characteristic spiked helmet and many of the inhabitants had mistaken them for English troops. Early in the war this error was frequently made by French peasants, to whom the British and Germans were equally unknown. The townspeople were still laughing at one old innkeeper who had freely given of his choicest supplies to the supposed Englishmen, and had spent the better part of an afternoon enthusiastically and vigorously grooming their horses, meanwhile keeping up a stream of frightfully abusive remarks “à propos de ces cochons des Boches,” much to the amusement of his Teutonic audience.
We arrived in Amiens after dark and there encountered an old friend in Mr. Richard Norton, the American archeologist, who is at present commanding a British Red Cross unit in the field. We had dinner with him and obtained from him much valuable information.
Mr. Norton’s train has its base at Doullens. He is tonight in Amiens on official business and has with him only his scout car and its driver. His train has received orders to report early tomorrow morning at a field hospital near the village of Bouzincourt which is only a little more than two miles from the “German” town of Albert. His train is to assist in the evacuation of some two hundred gravely wounded French soldiers who are threatened by heavy German infantry attacks and are even now under shell fire. At dawn he is to go direct to Bouzincourt in his scout car and there meet his ambulances. We have decided to accompany him to aid, if possible, in removing the wounded.
Wednesday, November 11th. After an early breakfast, we followed Mr. Norton’s scout car through a deluge of rain as it proceeded at a dizzy pace toward the sound of battle. We passed through the villages of Querrieux, Laviéville, and Millencourt, getting into a “hot” neighborhood near the latter place.
On arriving at Bouzincourt we found that the German attacks had been decisively repulsed at sunrise this morning and the French surgeons in charge of the field hospital had reconsidered their decision to move the wounded, nearly all of whom were in a precarious condition. The ambulance train therefore returned empty to its base at Doullens, travelling by protected roads, while Mr. Norton’s car, with our own, followed along the battle-line, his purpose being to scout for possible wounded in order better to direct the afternoon operations of his train.
Not far from Colincamps we stood upon the crest of a hill beside a group of nine French field guns. They were cleverly concealed in an artificial fence line carefully constructed in all its details along the hilltop. Fence posts had been erected and the artillerymen had also set up the trees, vines, and underbrush which normally follow and accentuate the boundaries between fields. The day was so windy and rainy that we had no fear of being observed by German aëroplanes, and therefore stood tranquilly behind the guns and talked with the commanding officer.
A mile below us in the valley we could through our field-glasses define the position of the French trenches and beyond them locate the German trenches. Between the two stretched that No Man’s Land, called “between the lines,” which runs from Ostend through Bethune, Albert, and Lassigny to Soissons and Rheims and from thence to the Swiss frontier. Following its twistings and turnings this strip of land is four hundred and fifty miles in length. It lies wrapt in uncanny solitude for in all its length there moves no living creature. It changes from beet-fields to plowed land, to pastures and back to the eternal beet-fields again. It runs across farms and over hills, through cities and under forest trees. It varies in width, here narrowing to a few feet, there widening to several hundred yards. Five minutes would be ample time to walk across it anywhere, and yet it is the most impassable frontier ever marked out by man anywhere on the surface of mother earth. No person may cross it, no matter how exalted his position nor how mighty his influence, for throughout its length hosts of trained men lie ever ready to let loose upon any intruder a thousand shells and a million bullets.
What sights one might behold if one could, himself invisible, follow this ribbon of scarred earth as it winds its way across Europe from the North Sea to the Alps! Its length is mazed with barbed wire and electric death, and menaced by pits and mines. Heaps of dead men lie in the sun or rain, and the wounded cry faintly and more faintly until they too are dead. The plants and trees are blasted and even the earth has been torn and tortured by explosions.
At some point along this line a moment comes when thousands of men start suddenly out of the bare earth like Sons of the Dragon’s Teeth and as promptly charge forward. For a brief moment their shouts are heard through the stillness and then their voices are drowned by one great hellish din, made up of the roar of guns, the crash of cannon, the scream of shells, and the shock of ear-splitting explosions. The ground under their feet heaves and shakes and the air about them is filled with a confusion of flying dust and débris.
As we stood on the hill-crest and talked to the French officer a furious cannonade was going on around us. In our rear, hidden behind hills, three different French batteries were in intermittent action, and somewhere off beyond the valley in front lay the hidden German batteries which were returning their fire. Shells from both sides passed back and forth over our heads and the German shells banged and burst a thousand yards behind our backs.
The guns beside us were silent. They had, undetected, held their present position for a whole day. They watched the two lines in the valley as intently as these lines watched each other, for in front of us was one of those crucial points against which attacks are frequently launched by the enemy. The batteries beside which we stood waited hour after hour for that sudden critical moment when the Germans should attempt to launch any attack between the lines. These nine guns could together fire two hundred rounds a minute, which means seventy thousand shrapnel bullets. These batteries were connected by telephone with the trenches a mile in front, and also with various observation points from which the results of their fire could be accurately judged and cross-checked.
A few hundred yards to our right in plain view across the open fields was the little village of Auchonvillers. Suddenly a great German shell burst with an earth-shaking shock in the open fields about three hundred yards behind it, throwing up a great cloud of inky black smoke nearly as large as a city block. It made a crater more than a hundred feet in circumference. The French officers said that it was either a twelve-inch or an “eleven-point-two” and prophesied that a second and more accurate shot would soon follow and strike the village itself. We watched intently and some minutes later a great shell did fall squarely into the little hamlet. Again a great cloud of jet black smoke shot up into the air, but this time it was mixed with bits of houses and fragments of earth. The smoke drifted off slowly, and reluctantly floated away on the wind until some minutes later we were able to discern the town as it emerged from the cloud of dust, showing a great gap in its sky-line.
We had lunch in Doullens with the officers of Mr. Norton’s train.
At one point in the front line we heard this story relative to barbed-wire entanglements. A week ago a lieutenant and several of his men ventured forth at night and succeeded in crawling unobserved under the entanglements. Reaching the German trenches they leapt in among their enemies and did much execution; but becoming too enthusiastic, they overstayed their leave, so that none of them ever returned. The Germans, not wishing to be again surprised in such a disagreeable manner, on the next dark night slipped out of their trenches and hung a great quantity of cowbells upon the lower strands of their wire entanglements. Before many nights had passed another party of daring Frenchmen again essayed to crawl to the German trenches but, ringing up the cowbells, were all killed in the resulting fusillade.
Not content to leave the matter as it stood, an intrepid Frenchman crept out on the following night, unwinding a ball of twine as he advanced. He succeeded in attaching the end of this to a cowbell without making any noise to betray his presence. He then made his way safely back to his own trenches and from their shelter vigorously pulled the string. A most ungodly clank and clatter resulted, wrecking the stillness of the night. This aroused the Teutons and led them into a solid hour of furious but futile shooting. The string was similarly pulled on several succeeding occasions and always produced the desired result of uproar and shooting, until it was finally severed by a bullet.
Our party arrived in Hesdin at half-past six this evening. It was raining furiously and the condition of the roads and the obscurity of the night made it extremely hazardous to proceed farther. The village was packed with British transports and we could find only one vacant bed in the whole place. Two of us slept in that and the other two on stretchers in the ambulance.
Thursday, November 12th. At eleven o’clock this morning we reached Boulogne, which is at present a British army base and almost deserves to be called an English city. It is filled with troops, with Red Cross and Royal Army Medical Corps, and with transport wagons, all British. English is heard on all sides and the London Times is by noon on sale in the streets. Bits of the front freshly arrived are much in evidence; one sees everywhere English Tommies on leave, wounded Ghurkas, and convoys of sullen German prisoners.
At present British wounded are being shipped to England at the rate of more than two thousand a day, which is probably one reason why their forces on the Continent have not, in spite of their strenuous recruiting and of the use of Colonial and Indian troops, exceeded two hundred thousand men.
The basins of the harbor at Boulogne are crammed with a heterogeneous mass of shipping—transports, warships, submarines, torpedo boats, Red Cross steamers, and great rafts of small sailing vessels which were tied up because of the war. The docks and wharves are piled mountain-high with great masses of supplies, and parks of ambulances and war automobiles await call to service.
Ambulances run hither and thither carrying wounded to the half dozen Red Cross boats which are tied up to the wharves. Each of these ships is painted white with a great red cross displayed upon either side.
Friday, November 13th. We did not succeed in finding the two ambulances for which we had come. Iselin left for London yesterday afternoon to try to trace them in England.
Saturday, November 14th. On our return trip to Paris we left Boulogne at half-past two yesterday afternoon and made a “forced march” of sixteen hours straight through to Paris, where we arrived this morning at six. It rained in torrents all day yesterday, all night long, and is still pouring today. We three worked in relays, one sleeping in the ambulance while another drove and the third read maps and showed passports to sentries. Dr. Walker and I slept while Colby drove alone over well-known roads as far as Abbeville, where we arrived at half-past seven. We left at eight after a hasty supper, and I drove the car straight through to Paris while Dr. Walker managed the maps.
I reported to the Ambulance Headquarters this morning and found that I had been assigned to duty in assisting Captain Kipling with the executive details of the organization of the new ambulance trains. In future every train is to be composed of five ambulances, one repair car, and one scout car, and is to be manned by an officer and thirteen men. Each such unit is to be complete in itself and is called a “squad.” As such it will be assigned to duty with the Paris Hospital, with field hospitals, or with the French, British, or Belgian armies. The field work is to be controlled from Paris by Captain Kipling and a board of three staff officers. O. W. Budd is to be Chief of Staff, E. W. McKey, Adjutant, and during the remainder of my short time of service with the Corps I am to have charge of equipment and material.
The Corps has recently been recognized by the French army, and from now on will virtually be a part of that army. It will receive orders direct from the Minister of War and from the General Staffs.
Friday, November 27th. Mr. Herrick leaves for America tomorrow. Today he was busy at his desk in the Embassy until late in the afternoon, during which time he dictated a personal letter to me thanking me for my services under his administration, a document that will ever be one of my most prized possessions.
Donait’s leave of absence has arrived from Washington and I am leaving with him tomorrow via Switzerland with special dispatches for Berlin.
I received an indefinite “leave of absence” from the American Ambulance, nominally retaining my position as staff officer in hopes of rendering indirect service to the Corps after my return to America.
Saturday, November 28th. It is impossible for the French people to understand why the United States should remove Mr. Herrick from his post just when he has so valiantly proved himself equal to the great demands which have been made upon him in the present crisis. In the diplomacy of other countries a plenipotentiary is never replaced in times of great stress, except as a rebuke to him or as an intimation that the policies he has expressed are to be reversed by his government. That a valuable diplomat should at a critical time be replaced for reasons of mere party politics seems incomprehensible to European nations.
Note.—The French Government sent a representative to America on the same boat with Mr. Herrick. As the ship was approaching land and Mr. Herrick was again virtually a private citizen within the bounds of his native country, this representative of the French Republic conferred upon him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest order in the gift of France and one usually reserved for her rulers and her victorious marshals. As far as I have been able to ascertain, this is the only time that such an honor has ever been conferred upon an American.